Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

Three articles recently published in PLoS ONE are the harbinger of a RosettaCon 2010 PLoS one collection. How do you design a new enzyme from scratch? How do you model peptide binding with almost no prior information? And what puzzles CAN’T Rosetta solve?

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As in previous years, we would like to invite representatives of the pharma and biotech industry to participate in RosettaCon 2010. Take part in the workshops, seminars, and have an opportunity to meet the Rosetta Commons researchers. Get to know Rosetta from the inside. RosettaCon will take place during August 3-6 at the beautiful Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat in Leavenworth, Washington, about 2.5 hours outside Seattle, in a dramatic mountain scenery – the only fitting environment for a scientific discussion really.

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RosettaCon 2009 has ended just a few days ago.

This was a very exciting meeting, gathering almost all Rosetta developers from around the world, and representatives of the major industry licensees of Rosetta. The talks were quite diverse, ranging from new Rosetta protocols under development, applications with regards to numerous biological systems, and up to code architecture and future development of the code.

For scientists specializing in a specific field (such as computational structural biology – just off the top of my head) there are rare occasions in which meetings are dedicated entirely to their topic. This was such a conference! All through the three days of conference and one day of hiking, people had talked, discussed, brain stormed, ate, breathed, thought, swam, hiked, mingled and laughed protein structure. If the coffee break was drawn as a comic figure, with bubble clouds to depict thoughts and conversations, it would be a sea of alpha-helices, weird looking loops, rotamers, ligands and co-factors at interfaces, strange folds and stranger rainbow colored cartoon proteins. A modeler’s utopia.
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Disclaimer: We at “Rosetta Design Group“, use, develop and love Rosetta. That being said, you’d understand our amicable descriptions.

Rosetta is a modeling software suite that can do anything that have to do with modeling. From ab-initio folding and homology modeling, through protein-protein or protein-ligand docking, and to protein and enzyme design. Dozens of papers were written about its different protocols and about their application to specific biological systems. The secret for Rosetta’s success are the Rosetta Commons: a consortium, including over a hundred scientists from over 12 Universities which continues the ongoing research and development of the software.

Every summer the Rosetta Commons researchers, world experts on macromolecular modeling, as well as the people behind the code, gather at the Rosetta Conference (dubbed “RosettaCon”) to exchange ideas and discuss future plans.

We would like to invite you to RosettaCon to participate in workshops, seminars, and to have an opportunity to meet the Rosetta Commons researchers.
RosettaCon will take place during August 4-7 at the beautiful Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat in Leavenworth, Washington, about 2.5 hours outside Seattle, set amid towering conifers and dramatic mountain scenery.

The Rosetta software is currently licensed for free to users at academic and nonprofit institutions and have over 2000 academic users in more than 32 countries. Commercial entities can use Rosetta by paying a license fee. Amongst past participants in these workshops are representatives of the big pharma companies and Rosetta’s licensees, RosettaCon Workshop 2008 was sponsored by Merck and Nanorex.

If you may be interested in joining us this year, please let me know, We will be sending the preliminary agenda to assess participants preferences in terms of workshop session contents and seminar topics, and to taylor them to your needs.

For more information and registration, email:

nir AT rosettadesigngroup.com